Conclusion

As we had feared before the tests, the 64-bit memory bus of the PowerColor X300 SE graphics card influenced its performance in the most negative way. Take a look at the cumulative diagram:

The described product fall farthest behind the full-featured RADEON X300 version in games that don’t use complex pixel shaders: it is the fill rate that affects the performance in them, and the narrow memory bus hits at this parameter most severely. The PowerColor X300 SE roughly delivers the performance of the RADEON 9200, but the full support of DirectX 9 makes it a more interesting product. Well, the RADEON 9200 and X300 SE just can’t meet anywhere: the former only supports AGP, while the latter is for PCI Express platforms solely.

We actually liked this particular graphics card model from PowerColor. It is a well-made product that ensures good performance for its class. The only thing it lacks is support of multi-monitor configurations, which has already become a standard even for entry-level cards.

Is this card going to attract owners of systems with integrated graphics? Priced at about $80, it really can, in those special cases exposed early in this review when the integrated graphics core like i915G, nForce2 IGP or RADEON 9100 does not satisfy the owner with its low-quality 2D picture, lack of DirectX 9 support or missing TV output. The i915G system has one more unpleasant trait – Intel’s graphics driver is full of bugs yet. You might also want to purchase the PowerColor X300 SE to save your system RAM for other tasks.

Cutting it short, the PowerColor X300 SE can be characterized like this: a high-quality inexpensive graphics card for users who don’t need fast 3D but want to have the functionality missing in integrated graphics solutions.

As the PCI Express bus is gaining in popularity, there will appear inexpensive computers with this interface. Many of such computers will probably be equipped with OEM versions of RADEON X300/X300 SE graphics cards, also from PowerColor.